The thing we call romance is a diversion from something truer, which is life.

When I'm writing, I think about the garden, and when I'm in the garden I think about writing. I do a lot of writing by putting something in the ground.

The families of rabbits or woodchucks will eat the salad greens just before they are ready to be picked; I plot ways to kill these animals but can never bring myself to do it.

He must have smiled at me, though I don't really know, but I don't like to think that I would love someone who hadn't first smiled at me.

Tomorrow exists even though I may not exist in it.

I had come to feel that my mother's love for me was designed solely to make me into an echo of her; and I didn't know why, but I felt that I would rather be dead than become just an echo of someone.

The people who invented race, who grouped us together as "black," were inventing and categorizing their ability to do something vicious and wrong.